Anne Verdier

"The outcrops

July 9 - September 8, 2016

Anne Verdier. Affleurant, 2016, glazed stoneware and porcelain. h. 46 x 56 x 49 cm.

Anne Verdier, born in 1977, is one of a number of young, emerging ceramic artists who are changing the face of contemporary ceramics in France.
With a background in scientific research in biology, Anne Verdier has been passionate about ceramic research since the early 2000s. With a solid training acquired at Langley College in West London, then at the IEAC - Institut Européen des Arts Céramiques in Guebwiller, completed by a residency at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, in 2005, the visual artist and ceramist is no longer concerned with demonstrating know-how, but with a process that tends to organize a relationship between the chaotic and the balanced.
Anne Verdier sculpts terracotta. Forgetting theory, the artist accumulates materials, experiments... she accumulates, firings, melts and then breaks... to see!... to show exuberance. For her, breaking is not the same as destroying; on the contrary, at that moment, the hammer becomes a sculpting tool once more, and then, just when others think it's all over, the classic work of roughing begins: revealing tensions, finding lines... bringing shapes to life. It's a scientist's ceramic, an intellectual's ceramic, but the aim is emotion, and a strong one.

Anne Verdier in The Eye

The hand caresses the rock. The hand molds the earth, leaving all the traces of an uncertain passage, so fleeting against the slowness of the mountains. Tenderly, it outlines what the imprint will be. Affirming an intimate geology that only has reality in the story the sculptor tells us. The landscapes resemble us, and the works of art begin when they are crossed in the morning, when the heavy masses of granite cores ready to plunge appear muffled in the mist, and the cooled organs rise up in the background. Nature is always the model, the source. Step by step, Anne discovers the possible sites of her inscription... step by step, she marks the places of her work, then leaves the deposits to dry in the wind, while the dialogue develops between the clay and the lichens.
What can we say in the face of immanence, if not our eternal need for humanity? If not our inability to remain as stone in the face of the world's remains. So, she bakes to remake the path and re-enchant its crystallizations. She bakes to shorten time and modestly offers us a few metamorphic crusts. Warmly colored extracts, over-melted pieces, shells.
The telluric image of the primary foundations appears - grave, heavy and discreet. A veil laid over the outcrops of the subterranean world ... Gaia's finery.
Philippe Godderidge, May 2016